The 2 piece bonuses are all 20% damage increases to some often used tanking ability. I like that.

The 4 piece bonuses are where it gets interesting.

Druids and Death Knights get a 12% damage reduction on a 1 minute cool down. Warriors get a shield that absorbs a significant amount of damage. Paladins get more avoidance.

This seems really odd to me and I am disappointed in the Paladin bonus.

To best understand the bonuses, we need to get some equivalence between them.

Let’s take your generic 40k Hit Point raid buffed Warrior. 20% of that would be an 8k damage shield. Using Trinkets, like Satrina’s Impending Scarab, and Last Stand, this shield could get upwards ofo 10 to 15k. But let’s stick with 8k for now.

For a 12% damage reduction to save you 8000 damage, you have to take nearly 67,000 while it’s active which should be roughly 10 seconds, which translate out to 6700 incoming DPS. (67,000 * .88 = 58,960, a difference of 8040 damage).

I think it’s fairly safe to say that most Bosses in Ice Crown will hit for more than 67,000 in 10 seconds, but I could be wrong. Shoot, I think most bosses in ToC do more damage than that.

The Paladin bonus is something of an oddball. Instead of reliable damage absorption (Warrior) or reliable damage reduction (Druid/DK), we get to take a chance, and roll the RNG of Avoidance.

I’m going to assume here that the 12% bonus dodge is not subject to diminishing returns because if it is, the bonus is flat out worthless. It's already worthless against magic damage.

The real flaw in this set bonus is that a combination of ToC and Ice Crown gear may give tanks so much avoidance that the Developers need to make more damage from the Bosses unavoidable in order to really challenge your tank's health. Unavoidable damage means that the damage can not be dodged or parried and the Boss can not miss. This is already happening, even in T9. In ToC the worst of the Boss attacks are all fully unavoidable (e.g. Impale, Freezing Slash, etc). 12% dodge against an attack that can't be dodged doesn't do much. It simply won't be as useful whenever the tank's survivability is challenged.

The irony to me is that we’ve heard from the Devs over and over about how they don’t like how high avoidance has gotten, and yet, here they hand Paladins 12% more avoidance. With this popped, a T10 Paladin might approach 80% avoidance. Palivasion, anyone?

12% dodge definitely helps you survive. It’s just that it doesn’t compare to the usefulness of 12% damage reduction or a 20% max HP bubble. So, yeah, I’m a little disappointed.

I’ve been firmly in the EH camp of tank gearing pretty much my whole career. 12% dodge adds exactly 0 EH. I would much prefer the Paladin 4 piece bonus be made similar to the other 3 tanks, and be either damage absorption or damage reduction.

4 comments:

If you compare all four, as you did, the paladin set bonus is not the same as "12% damage reduction", agreed.

If you look at the pally bonus on its own, though, you can say that it's just different. It is the odd one out.

Using approximately your stats Honors, if a pally has 55% avoidance and 13% block, the set bonus takes you to 67% avoidance and 13% block: that's going from 45% chance to be hit to 33% chance, which is a 26% reduction.

It is more luck-based than the other three set bonuses, which I think was the complain you had. But if you take it on face value (and presume it's not subject to DR), then the bonus is pretty good.

A thought on the Paladin bonus and it's wording: Does it proc when Divine Plea is refreshed by Touched By the Light? If so, then the uptime is near to 100% and it's pretty vastly overpowered - so what if it's avoidance, when it's 12% even after DR, that's extremely potent.